Jonathan Brearley

Jonathan Brearley is Joint Chair of the reconstituted Electricity Networks Strategy Group.

Jonathan Brearley is also director of the Office of Climate Change (OCC). It was set up in September 2006 and works across Government to support analytical work on climate change and the development of climate change policy and strategy.

In addition, Jonathan Brearley is Senior Policy Adviser in the Prime Minister's Strategy Group. In the past he has done consultancy work for Bain, among others.

In a Select Committee on Environmental Audit meeting held on 24 April 2007, Jonathan Brearley argued against the UK including greenhouse gases from aviation or shipping in any future climate change legislation prior to there being international agreement on this issue:

here is an issue for both shipping and aviation in the sense that these are international and, as yet, there is no agreement on how we allocate emissions between countries. One of the risks of including these within the Climate Change Bill, for example, is that we have perverse effects on policy-making itself. For example, in shipping, do we end up with ships being registered elsewhere rather than being registered in the UK? I would argue, until we have an international agreement that would allow us to understand better how we allocate emissions, it is quite a challenge for us to include those within our domestic targets."

In the 2008 UK Climate Change Act greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation and shipping were included in the calculation of the UK total.